The Presentation

Thanks to Dr. Paulo Miamoto for the translation to English and Luca Bezzi and Emma Varotto for the translation to Italian.
Ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, thank you for the attendance of this event. I'm very excited because it is the first time I participate in a presentation outside my country. I apologize for my Italian, which is not very good, not as good as that of my great-grandparents left here, more precisely Cremona, and went to southern Brazil in the late nineteenth century. I hope to honor them today.

I will briefly explain the process of the facial reconstruction, also referred to as approximation, of St. Anthony of Padua, this such notorious person, not only to the Catholic Church, but to History.

My job in this project was to digitally reconstruct the face of the Saint. Without knowing the identity of the individual, I received the skull to be rebuilt scanned in 3D, with the information that it was a male of European ancestry, aged 30-40 years. With these data initially started work cleaning and aligning the point clouds skull in Italian program MeshLab.

Then I converted this cloud of points in a three-dimensional mesh putting it on a scale compatible with 3D printing.

Then I imported the skull in Blender software, in which I positioned it at the Frankfurt plane, an approximate position of a living person's head when standing.

Then, using research data for soft tissue depth, collected ​​in living European men aged 29-39 years and average BMI, digital pegs were positioned on the surface of the 3D skull model, according De Greef and collaborator's study. (2006.)

Using the reference of depth markers and projections from the skull I drew an outline of the individual's face in profile.

For a more consistent anatomical basis, the larger muscles were adapted from a template created in partnership with the OFLAB at USP, the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology and Odontology, University of São Paulo.

This template is a file of a facial reconstruction that was made from from scratch, which later started to be used it as a base for this type of job. Through its deformation, it is possible to adapt it to any individual's 3D skull, regardless of sex or age.

So, using this template, the skin was deformed until it fit the references of depth markers and projections extracted directly from the skull.

During this process I counted with the aid of Dr. Paulo Eduardo Miamoto Dias, PhD in Forensic Dentistry.

As soon as the skin was adapted, Blender's sculpt mode was used to furrow its surface and evidentiate expression lines. I changed the settings of the template for the hair and beard and adjusted them to individual's anthropological profile. Then I sent images of it to the staff of Arc-Team and the Museum of Anthropology, University of Padua images reconstruction in two versions: with and without hair and beard.

Once the material was received and analyzed, the Italians disclosed the information about the identity of the individual. It was St. Anthony of Padua. I confess that it took me a while to realize who they were talking about. Obviously I was quite perplexed and greatly honored to know I was working on the reconstruction of such an important and notorious face. St. Anthony is the patron of the city that I live in Brazil (Sinop-MT). The hospital I was born in another city (Chapecó-SC) in southern Brazil is named after him. The name of my grandfather is Antonio Pagliari because of the saint and, even the name of the creator of the software used to reconstruct it, Blender 3D, is Antonius Roosendaal, in honor of the saint. Just to mention some examples.

Together with the identity of the famous individual, additional information was also disclosed, regarding his clothes and other relevant health data, as gathered by the Center for Studies Antonianos.

It was told that the saint would have had a stout appearance, due to a hydropsy condition near his death. As I did not have a survey depth of tissue taken in individuals with the same condition, I used data from the De Greef table, but for people with high BMI, in order to simulate this corpulence.

After these adjustments the facial structure, the clothing was modeled, the texture of the skin was set using as reference photographs taken from a 28 year-old man of European ancestry, and finally the hair, eyebrows and beard were set.

Here we can see the final image, approved by the Centro Studi Antoniani.

The 3D model was sent to the Information Technology Center Renato Archer (CTI Campinas), an institution linked to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brazil.

A few adjustments so that the mesh could be printed in 3D were necessary. These adjustments consisted in putting thickness to the bust, adjusting the hair texture and then applying a slightly rugged surface to simulate the volume of the facial hair.

3D model consisted of printing more than 1500 layers one over the other, until the bust was completed. Each layer has the thickness of a paper sheet.

Then it was removed from the powder repository with the aid of a vacuum cleaner. The piece went into an oven where it was heated to 65 ° for a few minutes. Then it was taken for the application of resin to another container. After a few hours drying the piece was finished and ready for transport.

Avail here to thank Dr. Jorge Vicente Lopes da Silva and developers Paulo Amorim and Thiago Franco de Moraes, all them from CTI's Division for 3D Technologies, which enabled us to do this 3D impression through a research partnership that we have for over a year.

The first testsof colorprintingthat were madehadsomecolor problems, gettinga darkerpart ofthe left side oftheface.

To resolvethis problemof color, we decidedto get in touchwith aphotographerin my city, the painterMariBueno.

Mariaccepted the challenge toretouchthe piece, with complete freedomof style.The result was amore homogeneoussurface withcolors and anice shinein the eyesof The Saint. Withthis step, we completedwork onthe presentationof the face.

Thanks everyone for coming to the museum and also for the invitation to come here and explain about the processes involving the facial reconstruction of this important man for the church and for the millions of people who worship him. This reconstruction of the face of a holy man, performed ​​with scientific methods, harmonically placed Science itself and religion side by side. Everything we did was based on appreciation for History, observation of technical protocols and respect for the church. Fortunately we were successful and here we have the result of months of work materialized in a bust, bearing not only technology, but also of faith passed down from generation to generation, over almost eight hundred years, since the life of St. Anthony left his body and entered ​​history.